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July 2012

Late Friday afternoon I had a meeting near my apartment, so when it finished I decided to head home and do my remaining work from there. I figured I could work while watching the Opening Ceremony for Olympics in the background. Much to my surprise, the Olympics were nowhere to be found on television.

I realized that NBC must be using a time delay and airing the ceremony later that night. Clearly they didn’t want their viewership split between a live broadcast and the time delay later that night. While I understand NBC’s rationale, it seemed very un-21st century to me and left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’ve been a big fan of Skillshare ever since I first learned about the site and joined over six months ago. That being said, until last week I had never actually used the service. Despite the fact that I had managed to accumulate a watchlist which consisted of over 30 different classes, ranging from ‘How to Homebrew Beer‘ (much to my dismay this class still has yet to be taught) to ‘Launch Your Startup Idea for Less Than $5000‘ and everything in between.

So what class was it that I decided to pop my SkillShare cherry with you ask, Introduction to Programming with Ruby. Its a three-week, six class course taught by Avi Flombaum (@aviflombaum). Hence the title of this post; MINSWAN is an expression used by Rubyists that means “Matz is nice, so we are nice”. Matz is the creator of the Ruby language who is beloved by everyone because he is an all around awesome guy. The sentiment is that, because Matz is so nice, everyone who uses Ruby should be nice too AKA help the Ruby Newbies.

Don’t worry this isn’t going to be some existential drivel where I talk about the process of learning as a human being and progressing as a civilization (that’s a post I am far too young and naive to even pretend to be able to offer an opinion on). Instead this post is about the issues I encounter when purchasing a tech gadget (computer, TV, tablet, cellphone etc.)… issues that I think others grapple with as well.

The issue has to do with what is known as Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law has to do with technological progress and it basically states that every 2 years tech capabilities double. In other words, progress is exponential.